It's just before 7am on a Tuesday morning in Liverpool and the city is not yet awake.
The temperature has dropped to around 2 degrees Celsius, with a crisp winter chill that bites your face and makes your toes feel hollow and brittle.
These are tough conditions to walk around in, let alone bed down in – but that's what an increasing number of people are now doing in Liverpool City Centre as the city grapples with a worsening homelessness emergency.
The ECHO was invited on an early morning shift with the outreach team from the Whitechapel Centre, one of the city's most prominent homeless and rough sleeper charities.
With our breath visible in the cold dawn air, we met with the charity's services manager Sophie Mayor and outreach team manager Russell Ainslie as well as outreach workers Gareth and Graham.
The outreach team are out and about every day of the week, all year round as they try to help those who have ended up sleeping rough and potentially direct them towards support that could take them off the streets. But this is getting tougher and tougher.
Liverpool is in the grip of a homelessness and housing crisis. The city council says rough sleeper numbers have shot up by 50% in a year, with hundreds on the brink of crisis as they tread water in temporary accommodation, with very little housing available for people to move into.
The council's leader Liam Robinson has described the situation as an emergency and walking around with the outreach team on a cold morning in the city, it's easy to see that such language is not an exaggeration.
Checks
Close to town hall, umbrella man
Sophie Mayor, services manager, Whitechapel
Russell Ainsley, manager of Liverpool outreach team
Going to meet the outreach team, who go out at 6am every single morning, 7 days a week, all year round, Christmas Day etc
"Their main job is to go and see who is out. If there are people that we know, we will do a welfare check, but we might not wake them up at that point. If there is someone we don't know, they will try and gather some basic information from them, see if they are known to services in the city and if they are up for a chat to find out what their story is and what can be done for them.
"Sometimes you won't get a response. It's early and it is cold. The team take notes as they go around and type it up back at the office so we have a record of who is out on the streets and can make a plan for each person. It may be that we are going to meet them at our assessment centre later that day to look at accommodation options and other things."
Sophie: "There are definitely more tents than in previous years. we think some have been given out. Essentially our standpoint is that a tent isn't good enough, someone should have a home. We want to get people into accommodation."
They all carry naloxone which reverses the effects of an opiate in case someone has overdosed. They have definitely saved lives.
"These days it is harder to get a quick solution for people because the hostel system is so saturated now. They are all full. There is a bottleneck because people can't move on."
"Are we getting to too desperate a situation now. Ideally it would be real accommodation solutions where work can be done to get long term results for people."
Russell
"I didn't recognise one of the guys but I knew the other guy. He's been in jail for the past few months and he's just got out and he's straight onto the streets. But we have got somewhere for him so he is going to come to the centre later today and we will work out what we can do for him and his friend."
Rough sleeping is a last resort, that could happen
"We've all been warned that there is a huge number of people being given asylum decisions, as an outreach service we aren't sure when that is going to hit us. It is a nervous wait, it could happen suddenly. We are already at a saturation level in the accommodation solutions we normally rely on and it is getting very cold."
SWEP – triggered today, it's about preventing deaths on the street, outreach is more intensive, lots of co-ordination with hostels and groups across the city to get people inside.
Two women in tent
"We can get these two girls in together, they wouldn't open the tent and we didn't recognise their voices. We think we can get them inside. Once you get them inside you can find out more about what they need."
Sophie: "We give out food parcels and the team at our warehouse have told us that the shelves are bare. Not that long ago they were fully stocked. It means that we are now having to use our fundraising budget to buy food. As a charity that is really worrying."